Corona Daily 151: The Case of the Vanishing e-books

Most of us are familiar with e-books, which we read on Kindle. Fewer people know or use e-books from public libraries. USA has the best system to borrow e-books. An American can simply feed the (physical) library card number into an app called Libby, and instantly gain access to millions of titles. Overdrive, which runs that app, is the leading digital platform for public libraries and schools.

The good news is that the pandemic turned 2020 into a record year for digital lending in public libraries. Readers worldwide borrowed 430 million e-books, audiobooks and digital magazines in 2020, an impressive 33% increase over 2019. Children and Young Adult genre checkouts rose by 80%. Audiobooks, which were growing dramatically before, declined. Not surprising since commuting stopped during the lockdowns.

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The arrangements for e-book lending are very different. For an e-book we may buy for $5 on Kindle, libraries usually pay between $40 and $60. A popular audiobook will cost $100 when a library buys it. Unlike print books, which libraries can lend to the same person repeatedly, e-books usually come with digital locks. After a certain number of loans or after a predefined period of time, the e-book expires by itself.

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Amazon, our favourite lockdown bookseller, has been killing bookshops. This is well known. Last year, bookstore sales in the USA fell by 30%. Every week, at least one bookstore closed down for good.

Amazon is also a big publisher. It publishes books and audiobooks under three brands: Lake Union (fiction), Thomas & Mercer (crime thrillers) and Audible (audiobooks). Amazon has almost completed its vertical integration. It is the largest bookstore in the world, it owns the reading device Kindle, and it publishes books. You can easily buy the e-books or audiobooks published by Amazon in seconds. But you can’t borrow them.

Amazon doesn’t allow its published books to be borrowed. Libby App or any public library has no access to any of the Amazon published e-books and audiobooks. From your local library you may borrow Obama’s A Promised Land, because it is not published by Amazon. But you can’t borrow an audiobook for Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime.

As one journalist said, Amazon doesn’t accept a library card, only a credit card.

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Living in Mumbai, I don’t have access to e-borrowing from Overdrive or another platform. True, Amazon offers its own library Kindle Unlimited. I subscribed to it for a few years, before realizing it specialized in not offering a single book I wanted to read. One may also subscribe to Audible to listen to Amazon audiobook exclusives.

What Amazon has succeeded in doing is creating two parallel literary universes. The public and the Amazon private. Don’t be fooled by Amazon’s bestseller list for 2020. It is entirely different from Overdrive’s most borrowed list for 2020, that includes titles such as Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, Becoming by Michelle Obama and Educated by Tara Westover. Amazon’s Kindle list of ten books includes six books published by Amazon itself.

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Reading is gradually shifting from paper to e-reading. I haven’t read a single newspaper or magazine in paper format for the last fifteen years. During research on a particular subject, a researcher wants to borrow hundreds of books, read what is important and return them. Surely, no researcher would think of buying all the books. Or restrict the research to books by certain publishers.  

Libraries are critical for students, who can’t be expected to buy hundreds of textbooks. The public libraries in London or New York are magnificent and well-stocked. In a place like Mumbai, with the library culture disappearing, my dream is getting an e-library card that allows me to borrow any book in the world. I am willing to pay a high membership fee for that virtual library, as long as every publisher, including Amazon, is compelled by law to make its books available for lending.

Ravi